


Further

by Cohkka (orphan_account)



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: African proverbs as applied to Scandinavian survivors, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 05:19:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3475943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Cohkka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you want to go fast, go alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Further

As Onni said once, dreams grow bigger as the dreamer grows: each time you can go a little further, explore a little more and see something different until you reach your border, and that is where you stop. He said then that in dreams, the border may be not ten, but a thousand miles away. Lalli knows it well. He also knows that what you meet on your way can be really tough. Dreams are not something that you can learn how to handle, you cannot adapt to them, but they adapt to you instead: the more you learn, the harder your next challenge is.   
Some dreams are scary, but they are a familiar territory – like that bog not far in the forest where you are sure to meet a beast or two in spring. But there are other dreams that are so frightening that they make you feel helpless, lost, and out of your ground. They make Lalli think about what Onni said and wonder if he has hit his own border. They tend to happen more often as the journey takes them further from the known lands. But they are the most important, and Lalli does not mind.   
Somehow though the journey helps to handle them. It has been more than once that at the moment when a dream became a mess, a sense of balance came from out of nowhere and helped him do something he has never done before. This is when he climbs out of a ravine, or pulls himself form the water onto a patch of fast ice – all of a sudden, he is standing on a solid ground, and there is a heady feeling that he can deal with anything. Perhaps this is what Onni called experience, or he is still far from his own border. Lalli has no idea, but he does not mind this either, so long as it pushes his border further away.

Despite all the time spent around Lalli, Emil still has some difficulty with the concept of dreams being just as real. What he learns though, that for Lalli there are different kinds of sleep. Sometimes Lalli just blacks out given a slightest chance – and he does not even need to be horizontal, which is absolutely amusing to watch. At other times Lalli's eyes move, his hands and feet twitch like it happens when little children go to sleep after too much excitement. At first it freaked Emil out a little, but he has learnt that these dreams are fine.  
But then there is a different kind of sleep. This is when Lalli frowns, his lips stiffen and his body curls into a ball - and this is what Emil hates. He has seen Lalli being calm around the things that made Emil himself want to duck and cover, so he does not even want to imagine what could scare Lalli so much. The worst thing is that there is no way to help – there is no spitfire or a grenade that could get where Lalli is, and Emil doubts that you can fight anything this bad with a spitfire. So the only thing he can do is to lie by Lalli's side and hug him tight.   
He knows it is almost impossible to even wake Lalli when he is like that, let alone get into what is happening inside his head, but he also knows from experience that in a couple of minutes the frown will disappear and Lalli's lips will start moving again. So he decides he will keep doing it no matter how silly it looks.

**Author's Note:**

> Number 13 in this tiny fandom. Hope there will be more of us once we have stepped over the unlucky number!


End file.
